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
How would I deal with discovering that I've got cancer and only have three years to live?
I think we all ponder those things.
But it's not until you're actually confronted by the reality of, for want of a better word, disaster in your life that you realize how strong you are or how weak you are.
I actually believe that most of us are much more resilient than we think we are, and it's not until things go wrong in our lives that we appreciate that.
We think, oh my God, if I was to be hit by a car and became quadriplegic, or if I was to get cancer, or if some terrible disaster happened, I wouldn't be able to cope.
But I realize that we all come from a long line of survivors, your grandparents, great grandparents, and so on, going back hundreds of thousands of years, all survived much, much worse things than we have to survive, and that's where we came from.
That's why we're here.
think it's kind of built into our DNA, it's built into our hormones, it's built into our culture, this ability to be able to survive and to be resilient.
But because we live such comfortable lives, we tend to think that we need the comforts, but when we're deprived of those through disaster, I think most of us realise that we don't really need them.
Look, uh you know, one of the many lessons that I learnt in jail, I mean, apart from the fact that you can teach an old dog new tricks, is that you can adapt to almost anything.
And the only light that we had in the cell for a hundred and forty people was in the squat.
toilet.
So I got into the habit of getting up at like two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning, using an upturned bucket as my seat, situated about well three or four feet from a cut in the tiles on the floor, which was kind of like the urinal, opposite the three squat toilets.
And I'd sit on this bucket with my notepad in my on my lap and with a pen, and I'd make notes and write letters to my family and
Specifically I wrote 50 pages of notes about happiness, just as I was as the thoughts were coming to me.
And I remember on one particular occasion, it was about, I suppose about five o'clock in the morning, and one of my fellow prisoners came into the bathroom to have a pee.
And he was standing, literally just standing right beside me having a pee while I'm writing about happiness.
And as he was peeing, some of his urine splashed onto my feet.
And my immediate thought was, Oh God, I better I better wash that off and then I thought, Why do I need to wash it off?
It's not a big deal And so
Showing 61–80 of 278 · page 4 of 14
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