This consideration begins with a thought posited by a famous mathematician, don’t ask me which one at the moment I can’t remember, the meat of it goes something like this; if you take any single combination of elements, a specific license plate in the original example, that is observed in passing, what is the likelihood of that particular arrangement appearing? Typically the answer is extraordinarily small. The more complicated the occurrence the less mathematically probably that outcome will occur. Which leads me to the observation that most of our days are filled with extremely complicated sequences of events that, due to the consistency with which they are accomplished, are given virtually no thought as we pass form moment to moment and event to event.
    The point, I suppose, is that if you rolled a pair of dice once and it came up twelve you might be a little surprised yet if you rolled the same set thirty six times the expectation would be to see that combination at least once. Any observed moment is like that one throw but the rarity of it gets lost in the fog of what we expect. Through this lens the improbable becomes the mundane and the beauty that exists in all these moments we observe, everyday, is lost.
    Like most things these days I’m afraid this piece feels too forced to find the mark for which I was aiming. Perhaps it is a product of the abruptness with which I have experienced the world of late that leads me to this chain of reasoning. Perhaps it is simply one of those rudimentary ideas I should have understood long ago. Likely it is a combination of both, but regardless of why this thought keeps occurring to me. It seems often that what we perceive to be the most mundane of elements, whose frailty we fail to see, become the ones whose beauty we are left to experience only as memories. Lest I stray too far into the realm of clichés my point is that beauty, at least in part, is a product of scarcity. By this reasoning and considering the very small likelihood of any moment occurring just the way we experience it, every moment has a kind of value. Banality is a thing that exists only in the cynical mind.


adendum:
         Having read this several more times I've realized that it is predominently a recrimination directed at my own observable possition of late with a thought that perhaps it would give someone else a moments pause as well.