James Rickardson
speaker
278 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2019
last heard Jul 2019
James Rickardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, what I found most curious was that I experienced a very similar range of emotions in jail to the ones that I experienced out of jail.
There wasn't a huge difference.
Of course there were times when I was very pissed off, there were times when I was angry, there were times when I got into battles with the guards and battles with the um investigating judge.
But fortunately my son came to live in Cambodia and bought me books and bought me healthy food.
And I found myself slipping very quickly into a kind of a routine that was
I was gonna say not dissimilar to the routine that I have back in Australia.
It was completely different, of course, but I in emotional terms it wasn't all that different.
And I think that one of the reasons for that, and this is kind of curious, I'm still in a sense processing this, is that when you're in jail you don't have very much choice about anything at all, right?
And there's a certain kind of freedom that comes with not having choices.
And what I noticed when I got out of
jail after fifteen months of no choices and found myself back in Sydney, is that we're confronted by so many choices.
manifested in like going into Woolworth's or Carl's and finding that there's fifteen different breakfast cereals, there's fifteen different coffees, there's fifteen different teas, a hundred different cheeses, twelve different kinds of milk and everything.
And you don't realise
until you've been somewhere where that choice is taken away from you, that each one of those little choices
produces, I think, just a tiny bit of anxiety.
Do you know what I mean?
It's like a little bit of your the bandwidth of your brain is taken up with thinking about things that you don't really need to think about.
And when you're in a cell with only books, and I was very lucky to have books, you don't have the distractions of the internet, you don't have distractions of the news, radio, alcohol, none of the things that we kind of presume
most of us think that we need in order to be happy or contented.
So I was kind of forced into a situation where I had to rely on my own inner resources, if you like, and I found that I did pretty well, actually.
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