A Word With Zul Andra: Loop

This is a meditation on loops: where the spiralling paths we take don’t return us to the same place, but to the same place changed
Published: 1 August 2025
Loop
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Loop. Because revolution isn’t just about overthrowing systems or the birth of new ideologies. When I think of revolution, I think of something mysteriously turning like a restaurant on top of a building. How do they do that? Why is this a thing? We may never know. All I know is that the circular motion brings us back to where we began, but never quite the same place.

It’s perhaps a familiar scene in the human experience: bathroom floor, tears streaming down faces that aren’t quite ready to be seen in the morning light. Not rock bottom—that basement level has its own distinct smell of desperation. This is something else. Something... circular. Some of us have been here before. Same cold tiles. Same unflattering shadows highlighting every decision etched onto our faces. Same soul-crushing realisation that we have, somehow, completed another orbit around a sun of our own making.

Consider the radical life decisions wherever shook emoticons pop up through social and professional circles. The banker who becomes a baker. The baker who becomes a caretaker. The caretaker who becomes a banker. These moves aren’t spontaneous—they’re often the climax of slow-burning existential crises that simmer on low heat throughout our 30s and 40s.

Well-meaning colleagues often assure these adventurers that they’ll eventually return and that everyone who leaves circles back eventually. The departees typically dismiss such predictions with an almost transcendent confidence—the serene certainty of someone who has Getty Images glimpsed a truth others can’t yet see. Yet here they are, years later, completing the circuit in ways they never anticipated.

Revolution. From the Latin revolutio—”a turn around.”

Life isn’t linear, no matter how desperately we draw straight lines between our decisions. We orbit experiences like celestial bodies, sometimes drifting closer, sometimes further away, but always about the gravitational pulls that shaped us. We are taught that progress moves forward like an arrow—education, career, family, retirement, a golden handshake with the Grim Reaper. No detours, no U-turns, no loops. Loops are for the indecisive, the weak-willed, the lost. But what if loops aren’t failures? What if they’re the natural rhythm of becoming?

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The Buddhist concept of samsara—the endless cycle of death and rebirth—is observable in the mundane moments of our lives. We die small deaths everyday, shedding versions of ourselves to be reborn as something similar yet fundamentally changed. That moment of recognition—whether on bathroom floors, in traffic jams, or during sleepless nights completes one turn of a spiral staircase.

The loop appears identical from above but is actually one level higher than where it started.

These revelations are about recognising the pattern of loops that define human existence. The relationships where people essentially date the same person with different names. The creative projects that morph but circle the same themes. The arguments with family members that seem new but recycle decades-old wounds.

In music production, a loop is a repeating section of sound that can be layered and manipulated to create something complex from something simple. The beauty is in the subtle variations that emerge with each iteration. The loop doesn’t change, but our relationship to it does. So, it is with life’s loops. When people finally rise from these moments of reckoning (knees cracking, backs protesting—ageing is its own kind of revolution), they often feel an unexpected lightness. The loop is an opportunity to notice what has changed since the last rotation.

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People change, even when they think they’re standing still.

The circumstances may look similar—weighing a return to stability versus continuing on an uncertain path—but they’re encountered with new eyes—eyes that have seen both the promise and the pitfalls of radical change, eyes that recognise the value of structures abandoned and freedoms embraced. This is the true nature of revolution: not the dramatic overturning of everything that came before, but the gradual transformation that occurs through repeated cycles.

A spiral that appear to be a circle until you examine it from the side and see the upward trajectory. Some call this “the scenic route to wisdom”—the understanding that humans rarely learn their lessons the first time around. We need to orbit them, approaching from different angles, before they fully sink in. Each pass brings new clarity, new depth, new opportunity. Revolutions—both personal and political—rarely create something entirely new. More often, they return us to fundamental truths that were lost or corrupted.

They loop us back to core principles with fresh perspectives.

The French Revolution’s cry of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” was a return to fundamental human values amplified through the lens of Enlightenment thinking. The digital revolution hasn’t invented new human needs; it’s found new ways to fulfil ancient ones—connection, knowledge, expression. And what of these small, personal revolutions? They aren’t about escaping the past but integrating it into a more authentic future.

When people return to former situations—jobs, relationships, places—they don’t return as the same individuals who left. They carry with them the revolution of perspective—the understanding that careers are vehicles, not destinations; that identity is fluid, not fixed; that loops aren’t failures but opportunities for integration.

The transformation becomes immediately apparent to everyone around them.

Something fundamental has shifted, though the change remains difficult to articulate. It isn’t visible in their appearance or even detectable in their approach to daily tasks. The difference lies more profoundly in their position within life’s cycles. They’re no longer trapped in a circular motion but riding it intentionally, like surfers who understand that returning to shore doesn’t negate the journey across the wave.

This is what revolution truly means: not just turning around but turning inward, not just completing the circle but spiralling upward with each rotation. So, here’s to loops, grand and intimate revolutions, bathroom floor revelations, and the scenic route to wisdom. Here’s to where we’ve been and where we wished we could be, realising that the end is often connected to the beginning.

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