parabolic flows are smoothing for short time however, over long time, singularities are typically unavoidable and can be very nasty. the key to understand such flows is to understand their singularities and the set where those singularities occur. we begin with discussing mean curvature flow and will explain which singularities are generic and what one can say about the short and long time dynamics near singularities. after that we turn to the question of optimal regularity of geometric flows in general. we will see that these seemingly different questions turn out to be related. the ideas draws inspiration from an number of different fields, including geometry, analysis, dynamical systems and real algebraic geometry.