The maddening cryptic clue that taught me how to go with the flow

“Wolf returns. Run (4)”. I stared at the cryptic crossword clue, but I wasn’t able to unlock its mystery.

There’s an aha moment when you solve a cryptic clue and you experience a rush of endorphins, a bit like a runner’s high, only much more powerful.

It’s a high when you crack a clue, but it’s a downer when the clue cracks you.

When you tackle a cryptic crossword puzzle, the empty grid feels overwhelming. None of the clues make sense.

But then you solve one clue and then another, and suddenly, your crossword juices start to flow.

It’s the Matrix effect; everything happens in slow motion.

But the world is not slowing down; your brain is speeding up and firing on all cylinders.

You’re in a state of flow.

Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the founders of the positive psychology school of thought, described the flow state as moments when you’re completely absorbed in a challenging activity.

You become so involved in it that nothing else matters.

But my crossword-cracking skills were going through a bad spell. The grid remained blank.

The clues were making me down and a cross solver. I just couldn’t get past “Wolf returns. Run (4)”. I was stumped.

I looked at the clue until my nose throbbed, my head hurt, and my eyebrows twitched. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.

I was in a state and it wasn’t a flow one because the flow wasn’t flowing.

I reckoned the stress of everyday life was blocking my flow so I decided to go for a mountain bike ride.

Cycling has always cleared my head. It allows me to shrug off the world’s pressure and gives me space to think.

It might not seem like it, but mountain biking and crosswords have a lot in common. For starters, both involve problem-solving.

When you’re riding down a trail at speed and confronted with logs, drops and dongas, you focus on choosing the best line, shifting gears or building up momentum to overcome one obstacle at a time.

The same is true for solving crosswords – you don’t take in the whole clue, but break it down word by word into its individual elements.

The other thing they have in common is they both involve a blissful quieting of the mind, where you are entirely in the moment. In other words, Csikszentmihalyi’s state of flow.

For crossword solvers, that’s when anagrams jump out at you, and you can rearrange “Britany Spears” to get “Presbyterian”, and can see that if you remove the letters “egg” from Gauteng you’ll be left with “tuna”. You also glimpse a “hero” hiding in The Rock.

The setter’s job is to mislead you with devious wordplay but when you’re in the zone, you laugh in the face of homophones, spit in the eye of spoonerisms, mock malapropisms and treat charades with the contempt they deserve.

Magic happens in crossword land when the flow flows.

Mountain bikers in the zone achieve a similar flow state.

You become dialled into your bike, and everything clicks: you roll effortlessly over rocks, float over roots, glide around corners, and sail over drop-offs.

So, to reignite my flow I went to Tokai Forest in Cape Town and rode to the top of the hill. I then descended down the trail, but my flow game was off.

I tried to avoid a rock garden and took a bad line around a bend. I bobbled, skidded, and lost traction. I went off the trail, hit a stump, and catapulted over the handlebars.

This was the second time I had been stumped that day.

I was a no-flow zone.

The wolf clue was haunting me.

I got back onto my bike and pedalled up the hill to the start of the track to try again.

You’re overthinking it, I reprimanded myself when I got to the top. Just be in the moment. Forget about the wolf. Forget about the world.

Just ride. Just have fun.

I was pedalling, but my brain was freewheeling as I began to float down the trail.

I bounced over ruts and jagged rocks, I bunny-hopped over ditches, I could see the best lines and instead of avoiding the rock garden, I shifted my weight back and wafted over it.

I turned the corner (the one that had seen me dismount disgracefully), and then, as I coasted around a berm, the answer to the wolf clue popped into my head.

Magic happens when you’re in the flow state.

The word “returns” in the clue indicates that the letters of “wolf” should be returned (in other words, reversed), and “wolf” returned is, of course, flow – a synonym of run.

So the answer is “flow”.

By cracking the “flow” crossword clue on the trail while I was in a mountain biking state of flow, I had achieved the rare phenomenon: a multiple flowgasm.