More than 20 years ago, James Ricketson read an article about the plight of Cambodian street kids, and his love affair with the country began.

Then in June 2017, the journalist and filmmaker flew a drone over an anti-government rally in Phnom Penh. He was arrested and charged with espionage — a charge he denies.

He was held in the notoriously overcrowded and under-resourced prison called Prey Sar for 15 months until he was pardoned by Cambodian authorities.

Now back in Australia, he has a new perspective on how to find happiness and what is important in life.

Here is his story, as told to Lynne Malcolm for RN's All in the Mind.

A coffin-sized space to live in

Cramped conditions at Correctional Centre One (CC1), Prey Sar Prison, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where James Ricketson spent 15 months on espionage charges. ( Supplied: James Ricketson )

The cell that I spent most of the time in had 140-plus prisoners. We had about one square metre each as our living space. Because I am basically two metres tall, it meant that my space was two metres by half a metre, essentially a coffin space for me to live in.

There were only three squat toilets for 140 men. We were in the cells for 20 hours a day.

I was very fortunate. Because I'm white and because I had some money I was able to get out of the cell for four hours a day roughly, and I'd spend all that time walking and talking to some friends that I made there.

Most of the prisoners didn't have that opportunity, most of them would get maybe 20 minutes a week out of the cell.

So the living conditions are very, very cramped. It's very hot and the humidity is close to 100 per cent, so it's very uncomfortable. Anybody who has scabies in the cell gives it to everybody else. Anybody who has the flu gives it to everybody else. So everything is shared, and everybody is sick, or most people are sick most of the time.

James Ricketson still had sores on his body nearly three months after returning home. ( Australian Story: Belinda Hawkins )

What I found most curious was that I experienced a very similar range of emotions in jail to the ones that I experience 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 investigating judge.

And I found myself slipping very quickly into a kind of a routine that was ... I was going to say not dissimilar to the routine that I had back in Australia, it was completely different of course, but in emotional terms it wasn't all that different.

What I noticed when I got out of jail after 15 months of no choices, and found myself back in Sydney, is that we are confronted by so many choices, manifested in going into Woolworths or Coles and finding that there is 15 different breakfast cereals, there's 15 different coffees, there is 15 different teas, 100 different cheeses, 12 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.

James Ricketson enjoying his time back at Sydney's northern beaches after his release from prison. ( Australian Story: Winsome Denyer )

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 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, and I found that I did pretty well actually.

It's not until you're actually confronted by the reality of, for want of a better word, disaster in your life that you realise how strong you are or how weak you are.

I 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.

I realised 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 are here.

Writing about happiness by the toilet light

One of the many lessons that I learnt in jail, apart from the fact that you can teach an old dog new tricks, is that you can adapt to almost anything.

The only light that we had in the cell for 140 people was in the squat toilet.

So I got into the habit of getting up at two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning, using an upturned bucket as my seat, situated about 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 would sit on this bucket with my notepad on my lap and with a pen and I'd make notes and write letters to my family.

Specifically, I wrote 50 pages of notes about happiness.

James Ricketson said he was surprised how even his emotions were during his time in prison. ( Reuters: Samrang Pring )

On one particular occasion, it was about five o'clock in the morning and one of my fellow prisoners came into the bathroom to have a pee, and he was 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'd better wash that off'.

And then I thought, 'why do I need to wash it off? It's not a big deal'.

That was one of many of the small lessons that I learned about how much you can actually learn to deal with that you would never think of in advance.

When I tell that story people go, 'ugh, how horrible, having someone pee on your feet'. But when you think about it, what's so wrong with that really?

Happiness as a choice

James Ricketson on his way to the Supreme Court in Phnom Penh in 2018. ( Reuters: Samrang Pring )

I felt myself to be basically the same the whole time that I was there. I had a couple of bad nights and I had a couple of low periods, but I have those out of jail in normal life anyway.

After I got out people said, 'Did you ever lose hope?' And I said, 'well, what is the alternative?' There is no alternative to hope.

You have to find the things that life is presenting you with rather than lamenting the things that life or circumstances have taken away from you.

Sorry, this audio has expired Listen to the conversation on All in the Mind

I'm not trying to pretend that I'm happy all the time, but I think that there are ways in which we can all flick a switch and say, 'OK, this is a disaster, what can we make out of the disaster?'

On the one hand I think happiness is a choice. I think you can choose to be happy, even though I'm a bit leery of the words 'happy' and 'happiness' because I think they are a bit shop-worn.

There are all sorts of other experiences that we have, like joy, contentment, pleasure, satisfaction ... and happiness is not I think the best of them all, but still it's a word that everybody understands.

I'm not even sure that happiness is the most interesting of the emotions that we can all experience.

I think contentment is probably a higher one myself.

Managing expectations as a way to manage satisfaction

Living in our consumer society, if you pitch your expectations in life to below what you earn so you've got a bit of a buffer zone, you're OK.

But I think that what happens in our society all too often is that if you're earning $100,000 a year and you're spending $110,000 a year, you're always going to be frustrated and anxious.

A lot of it comes down to modifying one's desires such that they are in sync with the reality of your life. At every stage in your life we've probably all wished that we were richer or better looking or younger or whatever, which is just a recipe for unhappiness.

James Ricketson is enjoying the simple things in life, like feeding the lorikeets, now that he's back in Australia. ( Australian Story: Winsome Denyer )

I'm curious about the philosophical questions that arise and have arisen since time immemorial about what is important in life.

Is our happiness contingent on the circumstances of our lives, like if we live in a nice house, if we have a nice car, if we have plenty of possessions or anything?

Or is it something that kind of bubbles up from within us, is it something that some of us are born with — a certain potential to be happy?

I think we all kind of understand that the most important thing in life is love — the love of our children, the love of our parents, the love of our brothers and sisters. And a love that extends outwards to the whole world.

Babies and children, what they want is to be loved, they want to be held, they want somebody to look them in the eyes, to make them feel important and so on.

I think all of us are basically just grown-up children pretending to be adults, and our needs are basically the same as children's are.

And I think everybody kind of understands that, but somehow or other we all get conned into believing that we need all this other stuff to be happy.

Sit with each feeling, knowing it will pass

We tend to divide different emotions up into positive and negative categories.

There is nothing negative about sadness, there's nothing negative about waking up in the morning and feeling grumpy, glum, gloomy, all those lovely old words that my mother used to use but nobody uses anymore.

It's part and parcel of our lives to have this range of emotions and we should just embrace them.

If you're sad, be sad. If you're unhappy, be unhappy. Just kind of sit with the emotion of feeling whatever you're feeling because it will pass.

And the same thing of course applies for when you are really happy and you're on top of the world, you've just fallen in love or you've won Lotto or something. That will pass as well.