Wildly successful true-life stories from the Beyond

Introduction

Today, countless ordinary, very old Australians continue to be capable and happily active throughout the entire last era of their lives and they are admired paid for this. Yet, normally elders such as these, who aren’t billionaires, or millionaires, or even any other form of financially rich, or powerful, are hardly ever acknowledge, nor encouraged. Neither are they normally paid for their extraordinarily faithful, valuable, even sometimes essential services to their societies.

The true life-stories in this book are just some of those in the last two generations, and a tiny few of the many successful lives, little-recorded, in Western World history. These people provide us all with understandable models for successful old life. These are humans to be inspired by, and to learn key life-survival skills from.

For these powerhouse elders show to us all that capable, responsible, strong-willed and everyday people can continue to generate plentiful, personal income. Perhaps these true tales of life also show we should never, ever too quickly discount serendipitous factors.

Peace, happiness, laughter Susanne Johnston

Story 1
Story one is itself a metaphor. The luscious fruits symbolise the old lady and her solo, though lovely life. As is her ascension and descent from a fruit tree each morning and night a life ceremony.

Title: Aged Lady-Expert Fruit Caresser

Many days of every year, particularly from the warm dawn to cooling dusk of every beautiful day of late summer, a tiny, laughing lady of more than 100 years old sits happily high up in some verdant tree. There in the sunshine, she chooses and expertly picks luscious. perfect fruit which she then wraps around with soft tissue. Immediately hereafter, she nestles each picked fruit down, with the others, into a pretty and sturdy though ancient basket right there beside her, up in the tree.

The basket is tied to a strong rope and pulley. When the old lady gives the signal, younger people waiting at the foot of the tree gently lower the basket down. They reverently carry the basket and its aromatic contents off, to be immediately transported to the best fruit markets in the big Japanese city nearby.

Who is this very old lady, and how does she get so happily so high up into that tree? This very old and happy lady is called “The Fruit Caresser”, the most expert picker and packer of her community’s Grade A unblemished, highest quality fruit this community is so famous for. So this old lady is greatly valued, and she is very well- recompensed by her community for her skills. The loss of her skill to her community would be a great blow.

To ensure they, and the old lady, receive maximum benefits from her unique abilities, this community ensures the old lady can continue to carry out her invaluable skill. They prune into the design of their fruit trees, shapes that grow to act like steps, and thus, they design each of their most valuable fruit trees to assist the old lady to mount to where the highest, and also often the choicest fruit, grows.

Meanwhile, the community has arranged younger people below, mainly to draw up and down the baskets so those are ever ready at her side.

Yet, while her community provide the old lady these able companions to assist her deliver their best fruit to market in the best possible condition, she ascends and descends each tree by herself. She uses two sticks to walk between trees as each day progresses, and to board the public bus service to transport her each day.

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Story 2
Story two is of a family where the carrying out of every morning’s game is a symbol of diverse, discrete links to power, wealth and success across three lives.

Title: Aged Experts

Some decades ago, a warm and friendly, slim and healthy, well-known and aged man resides, with his wife, in his own home in an inner-city, leafy Eastern Australian suburb. Where, around 5am almost every morning of each year the man is picked up and driven, by his 71-year-old son, to the local squash court.

There, they undertake a set of games together, and the father often wins. After each showering and dressing, they come together to sit down and enjoy hearty, laughter- filled breakfasts.

Thereafter every weekday, having exchanged sports clothes for impeccable business suits, the younger man drives to his father’s office. After dropping his father off outside, the son waits, watches his father ably mount the stairs, then continues to his own place of business.

Every workday dusk, after the son picks up his father, they often discuss their workdays. They stop to do a little shopping and sight-seeing, greeting of well-known associates in the nearby village shopping streets before driving on to return to their respective homes for dinner with their spouse.

The father and his wife are a close couple who generally enjoy each evening together at home. Sometimes friends and family members of all ages drop in and are made most welcome.

On weekend mornings, husband and wife stay at home and read and relax separately. Each afternoon of each weekend they come together to work in their large and beautiful garden. As they work, they chat about events which have occurred to each of them during the last week, and they plan.

Every year, the entire family spends the whole month of August together at the seaside.

The older man is 93 years old and has for more than a decade headed up one key area of the practice of psychiatry in the state in which he has lived all his life. His develops psychiatric theory and both also remain in private practice for two half-days each week.

This aged father and son still occupy the highest levels of their professions, where both roles are challenging, difficult and absorbing. The older man’s lifelong wife has an equally lifelong and robust editing and publishing career. The results all achieve are universally admired and each is very well-recompensed. All their lives remain happy, healthy, highly productive and fulfilling.

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Story 3

The third story is a magnificent ceremonial act leading to lengthy performance; a life of admirable optimism and reliability, trust, determination, perseverance, and hard work.

Title: Body Builder Buddy, Friendly yet Formidable

When in her 70s, an American married lady has a very close, lifelong, girlfriend, her sister, who suddenly dies. The sisters did many things including watching many body-building competitions together. For months, the lady is inconsolable.

Until, suddenly, she recalls a vow she and her sister made together, not long before her sister’s death. Recently they had become so inspired while watching a particular TV programme they had agreed to find out how to become successful bodybuilders themselves.

Though the sisters often attended gyms during their lives neither had any involvement in bodybuilding. So, the woman decides to honour her vow with a positive frame of mind, and actions, and begins, intellectually and physically, to learn how a person becomes a successful bodybuilder.

The lady has been married to one man for decades and with her husband’s support, she begins. The first cornerstone of the routine they create is they begin each day, in the half-light at 2:30am, with a 20-mile jog.

Suddenly she is out of her fog of sadness and depression and is now positive. Soon very fit, and happy too, by the time she is in her early 80s, she is an international superstar bodybuilder.

She and her husband are rich and successful as they have created hugely successful fitness of mind and body classes, for all ages, and especially for couples and families.

Their deep love and support for each other, their inspiring health and happiness are all admired and loved by countless followers.

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Story 4
A ‘boys-own’ type of adventurous life-story with great family ties, plus heaps of fame,

fortune and ceremony, forever and ever.
Title: Story-book Life Adventurer surpasses the beyond

As a very young man, a long-term South African citizen of English genes starts his tertiary education in the field of archaeology, where he is a top student. However, halfway through his degree decides he will never get in life where he wants to go. Unless he changes disciplines. So he changes, and then successfully becomes a conceptual exploration geologist – for all his life.

When his career takes him all round the world, his novel geological concepts prove extremely successful, and he gains considerable success, fortune and fame. Throughout his lifetime he continues to work throughout the world in this field, where he successfully develops new theoretical concepts. These are two of his greatest enjoyments in life in companionship with his family, and the love of life itself.

By age 70, his fame and reputation are world-wide. As he grows older, he always ensures he is in top physical form and as time goes on, deliberately develops more closely his closest, long-term family relationships. He returns full-time to his historic domicile in South Africa.

This decision-making means his personal happiness and life-quality has increased vastly. Though he finds ageing and staying in one place now reduces the possible number of new, interesting clients with their new ideas and opportunities.

So he accepts a long-term invitation from his alma mater to expand his regular activities to include part-time lecturing. This proves to be a most serendipitous decision for all, for quickly he becomes extremely popular with students. There is a great demand for his courses which are of much great and unique value, for he has always been delighted to share and exchange information with interested others. In doing so, he provides quality access to his own real-life stories.

Those are of real-world information, via the personal lens of his own vast experience and novel ways of thinking about the physical world. Now he particularly enjoys acting as teacher-guide to show others how to enquire, plan and then carry out the physical activities of exploration, and thereafter to draw conclusion and describe and illustrate those.

By 80, to his great delight, his tutoring opportunities have expanded to include regular trips into diverse geologic realms. He becomes even more famous, and in the process, extremely rich. Still entirely fit and absolutely ready for this type of work in South Africa, he once again returns to his beloved areas of almost every known, or imaginable terrain. Where he delights in teaching the like-minded in return for very high payment.

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Story 5
A dramatic tale of English decisions which led to far-flung choices and chances in life. A heart-rending true tale of love, support and partnership where the last partner continues, to the very end of life.

Title: Englishman in the Antipodes. In old age? To India A life performance across the global theatre and even into the beyond.

An Englishman by birth and education became a qualified agricultural scientist. Fresh out of university and given his family’s traditional volunteering habits, he soon found himself working for a pittance in various the islands surrounding Australia. Due to dangerous work conditions, he soon became badly injured.

Luckily will recuperating he met his lifelong partner who was of Chinese descent. Together and though virtually penniless, they decided to move to Australia. Then in their early thirties, once there, they each took advantage of the free education of that time.

Soon each became an expert gemmologist. Over time they built a substantial reputation and business, however, Australia’s boom and bust cycles proved too much for them. Being of serious, studious mindsets, they had for years read of the projected huge global growth. So they once again agreed to completely change their lives.

Again, with little capital and this time in their mid-60s, they disposed of all their belongings. This time they moved to another somewhere neither had ever set foot before, India. Once there they found paid advisory work in the gem business immediately. At the same time, and against all evidence, this couple and a few relatives successfully invented an on the ground network new to rural India.

They offered a way to loosely interlink landholdings of historically poverty-stricken farmers. Those who each owned a tiny plot of land located within the same area. To do so, they invented novel ways to maintain harmonious agreement within a group of people with a long history of alienation. Here, this Englishman’s dormant, though well-maintained agricultural skills assisted him to sew together this patchwork of small landholdings.

Once amalgamated, he created a realistic, economically successful farm management plan. Now in his late 90s, and though no alone, he still happily continues his advisory work every day, and is well-paid for his expertise. Meanwhile, he maintains the success of those small-farm Indians, and their land bank.

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Story 6

The masterly venerable musicians of New Orleans hardly need any introduction, and their ranks now continue, even into their 100s.

TITLE: Yes, Music is the stuff of every age of life

New Orleans African American masters of jazz are musicians who hardly need any introduction; their fame spreads all through the world with every modern generation.

Nonetheless, these particular, aged individuals remain especially inspiring when seen and heard up close and personal. When they can be met in this life is in a tiny, historic wooden shack they regularly inhabit at night, when they gather to perform together.

There is where normal people can go, too, for they provide a continuing exhibition of their very great talents to all and for modest return. The continuance into old age of their superb performing lives graphically illustrates the great generosity of communal spirit they, and their life-giving sounds foster and nurture.

I know little about the group of very old master musicians I once saw and heard there. For a few hours, in dense and humid heat, and smoke. Only know that I will never forget them, and their sounds. For everything about all those very old people clearly exhibited their enormously positive life-energies to me in ways I could immediately perceive through their magnificent music and their separate and collective presence.

Even though some infirm, some stick-thin and wizened, some far too smooth and rotund, all were masters of their art. Clearly, all loved music so dearly, and their enjoyment, of their own continued abilities to perform superbly, was palpable.

Each there was impeccably and perfectly costumed, each voice memorable. Each instrument glowed. Each in its own perfection. Equally evident the encouragement and admiration each of these inspiring individuals supplied to their peers.

I hear and see them each, still perfectly inspiring me on every possible level of life, at any age.

END.

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Story 7
A Girls’-Own Tale of High and Turbulent Old times Successfully Sailed

TITLE: Once-Upon a Time Girl’s Life

Once upon a time a happy little girl decided she wanted to have all the marvellous, sea-going adventures only boys usually have. So, she did, because at that time, the world had become ready for what was then a most unusual master achievement for any lady.

This fabulous girl, with the greatest encouragement of her family and friends, first became a very capable and qualitied skipper of large fishing and prawning sea-going vessels with many crew in her command. For years she was extremely competent and also well-paid and that went on until the end of her 40s.

At that point, because of her abilities, another unusual opportunity arose, again to move on and to break ground for her gender once again. She then made sure she was highly qualitied as a harbour-master, if possible an even more unusual and admirable achievement, for any female anywhere in the world, at that time.

Master of the operations of an important port, she successfully held that key position for decades while her fame became legend. Afterwards, she changed her life. Now, instead of successfully conquering the waves she has moved 9 months of each of her later life inland. To again travel and now to act as knowledgeable and well-paid guide to friends. To any others also wishing to travel.

She walks along, along or with others, the entire length of the Italian and Spanish sections of the ancient pilgrims’ ways. Wending, on foot, through the mountains, always with the intent of moving along to visit some of the most famous, venerable Christian holy places.

For relaxation and further happiness, she spends 3 or 4 months every year deeply immersed within her large and happy family. All of her life has kept her superbly fit in mind, body, and spirit.

Happy days of life continue thus for our now herself venerable, admirable, and inspiring, life-adventuress supremo.

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Story 8

Serendipity touches life at all ages. Only some know how to use it well TITLE: “Love Work: want to do so up to the very Day I Die”

Perhaps the early privations and separations led to the extraordinarily early resolve to make the best of life.

A serendipitous suggestion provided on a whim to an impressionable teenager led to a high achievement in education. Then onto a successful working life in the earth- sciences which played out all over the globe, although in his fifties, with his nine lives all nearly used up in dangerous lands, locations, and environments, he encountered some mighty health problems.

Some lingered, for some years, three, perhaps four, remained serious enough to hamper his then 60-year-old life-dreams. Though not for long; soon he was back on his feet and back at work successfully looking at, and for rocks and rivers and many other signs and all their effects upon each other, and upon metals and other materials.

At that stage, and despite some considerable physical disadvantages he decided he wished to learn other facets of the earth-sciences. Immediately he began to do so, through books and by engaging in many actual field practices, some difficult and tiring.

So, very soon he was out under the desert stars at night once again, and round him in his new adventures he gathered a tribe and they all learned entirely new, though related skills.

Some, most, from his oldest and most trusted compatriots, although some also new and till then unknown. Those elders loved their unexpected return to the field life of their earlier years. Every one of them has prospered, and continues to do so, and that allows them in many ways and means to overcome all the aches and pains involved in continuing a very physical old age, and all are happily far more fit than previously. Perhaps they always will remain so, happy and fit, all.

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