You stumble into a job at IBM. You climb the corporate ladder.

All the while, something is calling you from within. “I’m an artist.”

“It wasn’t easy,” says cool white dude and my hometown friend, Jim Hallenbeck, on getting back into the craft of painting after leaving it more than three decades earlier. “It took a lot of work.”

Jim’s oil paintings got juried with more and more frequency. He was selling them at very respectable prices. Retirement was fulfilling.

And then, the call came.

His former IBM colleauge and cool black chick friend, Teri Freeland-Jones, knew they would make magic.

Now a floral designer, Teri’s appeal was simple. “Black lives really do matter.”

Jim finds a zone, a peace of mind, as he goes about his craft and tells a story with oil on canvas.

“Doing this piece of art, in this crummy time, brought some solace to myself, too.”

Teri’s zone?

“I don’t have to get into a zone,” she says. “I am the zone.”

Check out how these two creative types reignited their crafts to tell prolific stories after three decades, and why they took a stand, a stand to “reunite black, brown and white.”

Two guests and one story of our time, on this episode of Story Warriors, the podcast for crafting great stories.