In 2025 I had a custom Harley Road Glide trike built. I still haven’t written about that in my other blog, Geek on a Harley– one day that too will manifest. But I got a custom license plate for it, and felt talking about that plate was a bit more suited to this, my main blog.
The phrase and its obvious meaning
The phrase I put on my custom plate is the abbreviation: PWROF3.
PWROF3 was my first choice of five that have to be provided to the BC government when requesting custom plates. The simplified meaning is pretty obvious: my trike has three wheels, and it is (in my opinion) pretty powerful. Thus “Power of Three”. Squeezing it onto a six character plate leaves PWROF3.
The other four alternatives were similarly related to the three wheeled nature of my Harley Davidson trike. But PWROF3 was my preferred choice, and that’s because the phrase has deeper meaning for me.
Going a bit deeper
Power of three is a spiritual thing that might mean balance, harmony, and completion. It can relate to time and life like the Maiden, Mother, and Crone trinity. Even Christianity has a grouping of three in the Father, the son, and the Holy Spirit.
Humans often group things in threes without even thinking about it consciously. But for me the number three was a big deal recently. During my hypomanic incident I experienced some rather extreme distortions of time with my mind racing far beyond my ability to keep up. I would produce dozens or hundreds of thoughts in a brief span and struggle to hold on to what was important.
But I found that I could hold on to three things- always three. Long enough to write down or otherwise make a note. Long enough to remember that note and be able to sleep in some comfort knowing I could find where I left off the next morning. The struggle was holding on to the three most important things, things I wanted to carry forward and build on.
I kept writing down some variation of the phrase “Power of three” as a reminder of what I could hold on to. Three was enough to hold on to sanity during the worst days around Christmas time itself when reality kept slipping away from me. I wrote hundreds of confusing notes, but I found I could remember three things that gave me the starting point to unravel them.
I destroyed most of what I wrote during my manic episode: It was a mess of ideas and confusion, terror and divinity mixed with the mundane. But the ‘power of three’, ‘rule of three’, or ‘three things’ concept stuck in my mind. PWROF3 as a license plate, therefore, carries more than the obvious meaning for me, which makes me happy.
