今回は、本校で英語を担当している松谷アリソン先生のお話です。

英文で掲載しますが、やさしい英語なので読解に挑戦してみてください。

“present”という言葉にはなかなか深い意味があるのですね。

What are you looking forward to at the moment? Maybe it’s your birthday, maybe it’s the Christmas holiday….if you’re a year 3 high school student, perhaps it’s going to university in a different prefecture and living away from home for the first time.

We often wish that we could control time. We want the unpleasant or boring things, like tests and long car drives to be over with quickly. We want to speed time up. On the other hand, we wish that fun times; family trips and hanging out with our friends could last forever! We want to slow time down.

Have you ever wished that you could time travel? I sometimes wish that I could go back in time and change the past. If I could, I would study harder, be kinder to my friends, carry on learning the piano. But a time machine hasn’t been invented yet, so I can’t go back in time and change my mistakes. Many people are curious about their future. Will I pass the university entrance exam? Where will I live? What kind of job will I get? Some people visit a fortune teller to try to find out the answers to these questions.

Time is made up of three parts: the past, the present and the future. In English, the word present has two different meanings. Do you know what they are? … That’s right, present as in a present, is another word for gift, like the ones you receive on your birthday. The other meaning is NOW; as in the present time. Every language has its own time expressions. In English, expressions like: Time Is Money or Time Waits For No Man or Time is Precious are common. Perhaps you have come across them in your textbook. One of my favourite sayings about time goes like this:

Yesterday is history; tomorrow is a mystery; today is a gift from God.

That is why we call it the present.

We cannot change the past; we can only learn from it.

We cannot know the future; we can only expect it.

What we can do is to try and live in the present.

Today is a new day. Enjoy your present!

（松谷アリソン）