Welcome to the Good Life

Today I had a revelation of sorts. I was just hanging out and I read an email my Dad sent me yesterday and it really touched me and put things into perspective. The jist of the email was telling me how much he loves my brother, my sister, and myself and about things we did when we were younger that showed him what type of character we had. It was honestly one of the coolest, my sincere, and meaningful things I've ever received in my life and it came at a great time. Over the last month or so poker has been very so/so. I've made a few peanuts here and there, but for the most part I've run very very poorly and it's been getting to me. I suppose every man reaches his breaking point and although I fully admit mine comes sooner than most, it's still very frustrating. But anyways, my point is that I realized I've been fully focusing all my energy and attention into the negative things associated with poker the last month and have forgotten to concentrate on all the positive things in my life like my relationship with my family, my fiance', and God. It's kind of scary for me to thing of how good I have it and I think I often take for granted how amazing my life really is. I have everything in the world to be grateful for and have been blessed beyond measure and still I find ways to complain. When I put it that way it makes me feel pretty lousy. I vow, though, that I will try and be more positive and above all focus on the things that are really important. Poker is weird because it's so easy for it to consume you. Don't get me wrong, there are alot of great things poker brings to the table, but I often choose to focus on the bad things and I believe there in lies the problem. I'm going to continue to play, but I'm going to treat it more like a job and try and seperate it completely from the rest of my life. One thing I've been doing that has helped a bit when I play is to look at everything as an investment and try to ignore the outcome. I ask myself if I made a positive investment (aka the correct decision) and if I did then I just try and leave it at that. Win/Lose/Draw and it shouldn't matter because it's all out of my hands at that point. I guess one thing that bothers me alot is a feeling of helplessness and that's the essence of poker. I know one thing for certain, if I don't get my head right and control my emotions then I won't last long doing this.

One another note, I finally gave in and made a twitter account. You can follow me @ZackCaldwell. I think twitter is cool but I feel like a bit of a creep following all of these random people who I have never met. Either way, I try and tweet often about what's going on in any given day or in my life in general. But anyways, gotta run...going to watch Poker After Dark. They have a great line up this week and they are playing my favorite game (PLO). WOOOOHOOO!

Zack