 I've been thinking a lot about flow lately and I just wanted to take a moment to share a couple of ideas about flow and its importance just to kind of maybe get you thinking to support the children that you work with or care for or to think about flow in your own life. So flow is this concept of when we completely lose ourselves in a task or an activity or a hobby or an interest and we basically lose our grip on time and reality. So the kind of things where you found yourself totally lost in something really really engrossed in it and you suddenly look up and it's got dark outside while you weren't noticing or you've forgotten to eat lunch or you've totally missed your next meeting because you were so so focused in on the thing that you were doing and in a good way. You were lost in it. You were totally in that world and this can happen if we read a book that really grips us and we literally have to keep turning the pages. It could happen if you were painting, drawing, creating. For me it will happen sometimes if I'm writing and it doesn't have to be something that seems creative. It might be that I'm writing a training session and I've really got a vision for how this is going to be and I'm completely lost in thinking about that but it doesn't matter where you find your flow but the thing is that it's great to find it sometimes. So the gift of flow is that it takes us away from the rest of the world. So as a young child I found that I found my flow often in reading. I was like Matilda, literally like Matilda, always lost in a book. I read voraciously and the thing about reading for me was it took me away from a quite challenging set of circumstances to other people's worlds and I was lost in those worlds and I could lose myself in them for hours and that was really rather wonderful and this is something that we can all do. So if we can find our flow we can have respite from the world around us and many of us might not need that respite all the time but right now being able to have a little bit of respite from the world, a good thing and this is something that can really help our children as well particularly if they do live in challenging circumstances or there's tough stuff going on for them right now. So being able to get lost in something really involved in a task, a hobby, a passion and interest for a little while and just losing grip on everything else around them just being wholly focused on that task is a super, super helpful thing. The other thing is that those kinds of activities can often also be the kind of endeavours that can help children to learn to express themselves and explore what's going on for them so it can have that kind of dual purpose but have a think about whether you ever do find yourself in that kind of state of flow and if not why not, are there activities that you can remember feeling like this about in the past maybe when you were younger you used to paint or draw or sing and maybe you think about picking one of those hobbies or activities back up you might really enjoy it and I think sometimes we forget that it's okay to do things just because they make us feel good and then thinking about the children in your care do they ever find this state of flow and if not how could you maybe help them to find that whether that is about creating the environment in which flow might happen so it's quite hard to get that state of flow unless you're in a relatively good environment for it so you need access to the things so if you're someone who wants to create through art you need access to the materials but you also might need somewhere where you're going to be relatively uninterrupted and have the space both physically and mentally to get on with that task in hand but the other thing that you can do is the adult supporting a child is to help to expose them to a range of different activities so they can try and work out what they might connect with you might be supporting a child who will find their flow through I don't know painting but they've never been offered a paintbrush before so I found that reading Good Night Mr. Tom with my daughters recently it was their class reader that is a book isn't it wow I hadn't ever read it before and wasn't really at all ready for it that's an aside but yeah Good Night Mr. Tom in Good Night Mr. Tom other than all the horror the abject horror and misery and my word then the little boy Willie he discovers a love of drawing and painting and he's just never had a chance to do it before and once he does he finds his flow in drawing and painting and it's something that he loves and actually he turns out to be very good at it but I think it's important to note you don't need to be good at something to find your flow and get benefit from it so exposing a child to the things where they might find their flow just letting them try a whole bunch of different stuff and seeing what may be connects for them what might work for them can be a helpful thing that you can do as an adult okay rambly it wasn't meant to be it was meant to be short flow think about flow that's the task for today and I'd love to hear how you find your flow and whether you have supported children to discover theirs and whether you agree with me on this that flows an important thing and that it can be a really helpful tool for kind of respite creativity and exploration of feelings