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
That was one of many l of the small lessons that I learned about how much you can actually learn to deal with that you would never think in advance.
I mean when I even tell that story of people like, Ooh, how horrible having someone peer on your feet But then when you think about it, what's so wrong with that, really?
So yes, I I made about fifty pages of notes about happiness.
A lot of the books that I read, particularly the philosophers, people like Seneca and so on, had pondered what happiness is and and Socrates of course and what is important in life.
So those were the thoughts that were kind of floating around in my brain.
Plus, I was surrounded by Cambodians who were basically happy.
I mean really interesting.
Truly it's unbelievable that you could have a hundred and forty men in a in a cell and for most of the time, with a few exceptions, they'd be happy.
And one of the reasons I think is because their lives are so tough anyway.
This was not that much tougher than life outside jail, but also because they don't have expectations.
that we have.
I think in our world, in the consumer society that we're a part of, we pitch our expectations to what we're told we need.
We need a plasma screen, we need the latest iPhone, we need a a big flash car, we need a bigger house, we need a bigger mortgage, all that kind of stuff.
Whereas if you're in a situation where those choices are not open to you, you just accept whatever
is given to you.
And so for the most part, my fellow prisoners just accepted not just the privations that they were experiencing, which is a good thing I think, but the bad side of it is that they also accept that they are treated badly by the Cambodian judicial system, which is a bad thing, because what I've had to do was to fight against the judicial system and make it quite clear that I was not going to accept what they were
trying to do to me.
Whereas most of the Cambodians just do accept it.
So it's it's a double edged sword that thing of accepting the world that you're in and and also wanting to change it and doing what you can to change it.
Um I did, yes, I did indeed.
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