I no longer anticipate or dwell on negative thoughts and feelings, instead I allow everything to go with the flow, and let it go.

Letting go gets described as a decision. It behaves much more like a practice you repeat, often about the same thing, sometimes for years.

There's a message someone has reread perhaps forty times — the wording of it, the timing, what they should have said back. Each rereading is a small act of holding on, and each one arrived feeling involuntary.

The shift isn't in never having the thought. It's in the second thought: noticing you're back there, and putting the phone down thirty seconds sooner than last time. Thirty seconds compounds. Flow isn't the absence of eddies; it's what the water does after them.