 The World Health Organization recently suggested that we should lose the term social distancing because they suggested that we need to be physically distant whilst actually building social closeness and emotional closeness and I just wanted to visit that as a really important point right now. So I'm doing a lot of work at the moment thinking about the wider reopening of schools and how do we create a nurturing environment during social distancing and that terms become a real sort of bugbear for me because we don't want social distance we want physical distance and physical safety whilst building emotional and social closeness and building emotional and social safety and actually that term social distancing I think is somewhat getting in the way because we think we need to be distant in every sense of the word and we hear that term again and again and again social distancing and I think it's reinforcing not quite the right message and yeah it's just words and maybe it doesn't really matter it's how we interpret it that counts but I do think that when you're hearing it all the time all the time all the time it's really reinforcing quite a negative thing. Many of us as this period has continued begin to feel a little bit more isolated a little bit more alone and actually finding ways to build those connections to build social closeness despite physical distance is a really important and crucial thing in my opinion so I guess I put it out there is a challenge and a question do you think that the term social distancing is okay and regardless of what you think of the words how do we go about building that social closeness that social connectedness whilst maintaining a safe physical distance what does that actually look like in practice I'd love to hear your ideas please leave a comment