I mean current flow or more exactly electrons flow when the circut is closed but when lightening strikes there isn’t any closed circuit so shouldn’t there be positively charged particles out there and if there are then how do they become neutral again?
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> isn’t any closed circuit
A circuit doesn’t always have to be completely closed at a specific moment in time for current to flow, only if you want current to flow *continuously*. Ummm I think the best way to illustrate the difference is that you’d normally think of a circuit like a water pipe spinning a little model watermill, then the water goes down the drain and into the sewer and back in the water cycle. You could however also fill a bucket from the tap, wait around for a few hours and then dump that bucket onto the watermill and thus down the drain. The circuit is effectively “closed”, there is just a disconnect in time between when one half of it is closed and when the other is, while the water is waiting in a bucket.
What happens in clouds is that charges are separated using kinetic energy, which sets up a situation where the clouds are charged to a high voltage. They then wait a bit, and at some trigger, the charges suddenly equalize with the ground again to reach a low relative voltage with the ground.
There is also the thing where “closed circuit” is kind of an abstraction. Voltage is more like pressure. Electric charge doesn’t seek to go back to their specific little house after a trip, it wants to escape a high pressure container towards some low pressure target. If you have something crammed full of charge and connect it to something that has room for those charges (is at a lower pressure), you can expect the charge to flow through the connection until both objects are at equal “pressure”.
See [the Oxford Electric Bell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtQGYz4f3YQ). The two electrodes are never directly connected. One is at a high pressure, one at low pressure. The little bell clapper ferries charge between them by equalising pressure with whatever electrode it touches and then getting repelled towards the other.
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