Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada mas;
caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atras,
se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino, Sino estelas en la mar.

Antonio Machado

English translation:

Traveler, your footprint is your path and nothing else;
Traveler, there is no way, the way is made by going.
By walking you make the path, and when you look back,
You see the track where you should never walk again.
Traveler, there is no way, only the wake in the sea.

A broker's life is a little bit like a poet's life at times. The difference is that we, as brokers, carve our words and lay down our stanzas in search of Understanding and Agreement, not in pursuit of Truth. One may write poetry or own an international brokerage firm with two dozen other people as a vocation, "...by walking you make the path".

For the love of the process and the team, we work from the heart, without a map. In our daily battle against ignorance and indecisiveness, we aim to create the clarity that will temporarily stay confusion and give us -- and our clients -- a brief refuge from the impending tyranny of entropy. Our hope, with Antonio Machado, is that Trust and Devotion will outlast Rust and Corrosion.

Antonio Machado was a rebel who did not conform with his society's rules. When he wrote this poem in 1917, he was teaching school in a small Spanish city named Soriato. He witnessed war, lived through the period of extreme social and political discontent that brought the Spanish Civil War to his homeland, and experienced the personal trauma of his young wife's death. It is the relentlessness of these struggles that enhanced and elevated his poetry to a new level.

We each create a path by the steps we take toward our goals . In his poem, Machado the existentialist utilizes an image of the sea to represent his view of our path through life's length. That is, no one leaves a true path for another to follow; each path taken evanesces like a ship's wake in the water. We don't need to follow anyone's path but our own. In fact, no other path exists, but the one of our own active creation.

At IRC we strive to create an individual path for each client by moving forward with an original view of each situation. We know that only by being authentic can we achieve our personal goals, help our clients reach their goals, and go where we have never been before, whether through new personal discoveries or through creative insurance and finance solutions.