My name is Cary Darling and I’m a 41 year old humortologist, philosophosizer, and reformed poker player living in Las Vegas.
After four years of chasing the dream of being a professional poker player, I came to realize one of my biggest stumbling blocks was how one dimensional I had become. I was spending most if not all of my time studying, playing and discussing poker to the exclusion of so many other things available to me in life.
All I could see every day as I sat down at a poker table, whether it was live and in person or on the net, was how tough my life was. I focused solely on the losses and rarely the wins. I came to the conclusion that God hated me, he did not want me to succeed and for those four years it was true.
It was true not so much because if there really is a God he decided whether arbitrarily or with purpose that my business would fail, or for every new door that would be opened it would somehow be closed. Oh I could cite every instance where this actually occurred, I kid you not when I tell you that new laws were passed to keep me from having that dream job I always wanted.
The reason it was true is that I completely forgot something while sitting in my corner of life sulking, sucking my thumb and desperately clinging to whatever security blanket I could find. I forgot how blessed I truly was, or how that no matter how much I want to blame others my life is my responsibility. I as a human being, a man with free will am the creator of my own destiny.
In the last year alone I have made promises that if my life had not changed by the World Series of Poker in 2008 that I would take my own life. I said this just weeks after what I consider to be a life saving surgery. This is a year in which I have dropped over 80 pounds since that surgery. I live in a beautiful home in a gated community with a swimming pool, gym, and golf course. I have traveled across country and been on a cruise to Mexico. Most of my days are spent enjoying the company of some truly amazing friends and seeing Las Vegas shows like Danny Gans, Steve Wyrick, Roseann Barr, Clint Holmes and many more for FREE!. And most importantly I am loved and respected by these amazing friends and family alike.
I am blessed! I don’t how many more ways I can say it.
What led me to finally understand this is poker. Sometime around October of 2007 I began to feel as though there were something important missing from my life, I began to reach out to some friends, I even spoke of going back to church.
I took a good hard look at the time I was spending with poker and the results I was achieving. While I was a winning player, I did see how imbalanced my life had become. I needed a sense of direction, I have said way too many times over the last couple of years that I felt lost. So, I quit poker cold turkey and what hit me like a ton of bricks a few weeks later when trying to find something to fill that new void was that I didn’t really know anything else.
What I finally came to realize was that what I was missing in my life was living. There’s an old saying, “either get busy living or get busy dying.” I wanted to live, and that was my choice.
