Gradually, like the October mist, a plan melts into stark reality and you find yourself, your career and your plans going six weeks to Sunday and nowhere near where they should have been. So you end up at the back of the class, the integral part of the masses the media keeps referring to, the public opinion that gets no identity, just a blob of jell-o, according to public opinion…
The toughest part to play in the orchestra of life is second fiddle. For most of us the fifty odd years we work never go beyond the back row or the support role or the subordinate staff level, our lives, spent moving to other people’s tunes, responding to their moods, their calls, their signals, their priorities. Then, one day, it is all over and we are dispatched to the farm and all we have to show for it is a crummy badge of loyal service or something equally tacky, a refined way of telling us that we settled for seconds.
We must wonder what point it is in time or career that we give up the reach for the stars and accept that the battle to be the conductors in life is ended. We will never hack it, all we will be is faceless people in row seven, seat six, next to the man with cymbals, you, that fellow, whatsisname yeah, you, the one with the second fiddle. Think of it. When we are born and everyone loves us and tickles our tummies and granddad says we are going to be famous there is actually a tenuous but very real belief that we will write the script of our own lives, do it our way, march to our own drumbeat and the heck with everyone else. Then, it all goes wrong. We find we are compelled to do the other man’s bidding, dance to some other tune, well, maybe for now, but next year we shall write our own score, go out there and show them we can be number one, hello, can anyone hear us, we are the tops.
That year never comes. Gradually, like the October mist the plan melts into stark reality. We won’t ever make it, the cigar goes to someone else, we’ll have to settle for the exhale. One feels sad when we face these facts. Sadder, when the victims of surrender meet with you and you read it in their faces and their crumbled posture, the fight has gone out of them. Their lives have become so reactive and responsive. A phone call is a command, a day in the office is a string of orders and demands, the right to decide made by others for them. Always reacting on someone else’s behalf, never acting on their own.
Like the man who did his giving up recently and opted for the slow lane, taking up a junior position under people who would never learn half as much as he had forgotten. And when he was asked what happened to the stars, he was so close he could have touched them and he said the rug had been pulled out from him once and he hadn’t the energy to try again. How could he give up so soon? It’s easier, he said, it’s okay. I don’t care.
He has a phrase for it. Lateral movements. What a pleasant way to say the end of the road, all passion spent, just go through the motions. It’s frightening. Will we all end up like that. Who knows what that little last straw it is that knocks one off the perch and breaks your back or when it will it descend upon you. Maybe you just won’t see it coming one day, that will that…second fiddle. Take it or leave it. A whole life spent taking orders, there’s got to be more except sometimes there isn’t. Count your blessings, even second fiddles have a tune, a role, imagine when you are whining about your condition the millions who do not even make the orchestra.
