License Plate Philosophy

Mobile wisdom

“Life is eternal. Where will you spend yours?” is the best license plate message I have seen in more than 20 years of driving.

However, to me, the question should be more like “Life is eternal. How will you spend yours?”

Whenever I see a customized license plate, I drive as closely and safely as possible to the car in front of me to read the message. You could say that I rejoice in mobile wisdom while driving.

Some license plates custom messages are funny, such as “horn broken…watch for finger,” “move or move over,” “certified old fart,” and so on. Other license plates are my food for thought, such as:

I think. Therefore I do.

Live to race. Race to live.

I think. Therefore, we have nothing in common.

While T-shirts can easily display someone’s beliefs, hobbies, silliness, etc., driving around different parts of a town, a state, and a country can be much more effective in planting philosophical seeds into people’s hearts and minds through playful and wise messages displayed on license plates.

I’m not the only one in our family interested in license plates.

Whenever we drive out of state to a big national park, my husband has fun checking out license plates for the mere purpose of establishing the origin of the drivers. The farther people drive to reach a certain destination, the more pleased my husband is.

“Wow! Look at those people! They drove to Yellowstone all the way from Florida!” he would exclaim.

At times, when my hubby can’t read the state on the license place, he gets dangerously close, after which he announces the name of the state with the same satisfaction as if he had discovered that state himself.

Our teenage kids are unimpressed, but sometimes they play along with both my hubby and I by offering a long, sarcastic “Wowwww.”

Either way, I think that each customized license plate holds eternal truths that become part of our everyday lives interwoven with our personal, political, and philosophical points of view.

Although my license plate has “Dynamic Real Estate” on it, the name of my company, I might want to replace it with a philosophical and poetic stanza from one of my poems:

“I run, therefore I write. “