The biggest change in my adult life, parenthood notwithstanding, is one I made eight years ago. With little idea of what I was getting into, I made a transition from 15 years in documentary television to writing books. This was a strange new life: the long desk hours, the obsessive searching for le mot juste, the fetching work uniform of pyjama bottoms, old T-shirt and hair grips, a routine occasionally interrupted with scrubbed-up forays to book festivals or conferences to evangelise about the fruits of those hours and pitiful standards of grooming.

Just one thread runs from my old life to the new and it’s one that not only keeps me sane, but also drives my writing. You’d be forgiven for thinking I’d traded a gregarious line of business for a solitary one, but the fact is that my work is still built upon conversations. That’s what I do: I talk to people, ordinary and extraordinary, collecting and curating their stories and finding in them real wisdom as to how and why we live as we do. It’s philosophy of a sort, but out of the ivory tower and on the mean streets of everyday life. It’s led me to write books about what it means to be brave, about how to live well alongside risk and most recently about our human appetite – and capacity - for change.

Three years in the making, Metamorphosis – How and Why We Change, was my response to a sense that desire for change was in the air, a nebulous clamour for transformation that seemed to be getting louder by the minute. Everywhere I looked, metamorphoses of body, mind or lifestyle were being sought or peddled, often with little clarity about why they were needed, let alone what the end result might be.

Even so, I found it impossible to feel cynical about so much yearning for change. Making deliberate changes in your life is the very definition of freedom: it’s about autonomy, democracy, choice. Change matters. That’s why, in late 2013, I set out to better understand it, spending months with men and women who’d experienced or pursued great change: a morbidly obese recluse who lost 18 stone in 18 months; a Trappist monk who fell in love; a heroin addict who was seven years clean; a radical Islamist who turned his back on holy war; a classical violinist who became a policeman.

What came from this was Metamorphosis: a book about why we want to change, the extent to which we can change and how it can be done. I delivered the manuscript in 2015, took a holiday and in early 2016, the book went to press.

Then the world promptly caught fire.

Metamorphosis was published a fortnight after Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee in the US presidential race, and one month before the UK’s Brexit vote. In one stride, change moved from the lifestyle pages to the headlines. For the first time in my adult life, it was possible to watch seismic change happen, quite consciously and live on rolling news. It was not that I’d seen all this coming, much less the ugly tide of division and uncertainty that would follow. What I’d observed was a great groundswell of desire for personal change, and I – like so many others – had regarded this as distinct from desire for political change. Of course, we now know the personal and the political are intimately entwined, and that a legion of ordinary men and women dissatisfied with their lives and hungry for something new is a force to be reckoned with.

None of which is an argument for stasis, as if that were ever an option, nor for that old adage, “be careful what you wish for”. I may hurl a copy of my book at the next person who offers that commentary on our present turmoil. What I am saying is that directing our hunger for change wisely is more important today than at any other time in the last half century. We can’t simply yearn for change, emote about it, even campaign for it. We each have a responsibility to think about it – personally and collectively. Think. Think about the why, what, when and how. Everyone who told me their story for Metamorphosis did that; if they can do it, then surely so can we.

Extract

The clanging of metal chairs being stacked, the pop of pool shots and the hum of a drinks machine all seep through into a windowless back office at a youth centre in Walthamstow, north-east London. Here a conversation of some intensity is unfolding beneath a single strip light.

“Would you view yourself as having been radicalised?”

“No, not really, but I guess from the outside looking in, you’d think I had.”

“I mean, you had been radicalised, hadn’t you? You’d certainly set off down the road.”

“I’d like to say no, though the reality is that, yes, I had. But look, this is where a lot of people get it all wrong. I’d say I was abused. My emotions were abused, my sympathies, my faith, you know? It was a strategy of manipulating what I felt and how I felt to suit their own objectives. And I wasn’t a kid, so I was stupid for believing it, but it was the praying, them being so devout. I was fooled into thinking that these are really pious individuals and that they wouldn’t lie. So it was naive, I’d say. And there’s this bond of brotherhood, it’s embedded within Islam, so here was a route for me to do something about the innocent people being killed. I felt that I had a role to play and I do, but just not that way.”

“Would you have been prepared to take up arms if it had come to that?”

“Yes, I think it would’ve ended up in that situation. I really don’t know what was planned for me, but it scares the life out of me to be honest. Looking back now, it did change me from being who I am. I lost my identity, to tell the truth, at that point.”

More about the book

Though Morland hops adroitly through the philosophy and literature and psychology of life as constant flux – from Heraclitus’s “no man steps into the same river twice” through William James’s sense that “we are spinning our own fates” – this is not one of those “mind, body, spirit” books that is heavy on platitude and light on example. Morland, for many years an award-winning documentary maker, has twitchy antennae for all kinds of surprising stories that will illuminate her theme. She starts as she means to go on with the memorable tale of an Edinburgh police sergeant, Ed Coxon, who lived a previous life as an internationally acclaimed violinist. Music, for Coxon, the son of a university classics professor and a singing teacher, was always what he was meant to do. Until one day in his 30s, after nearly 20 years touring the concert halls of Europe, playing for legendary conductors, he decided it was not. He knew, he had always perhaps known, that if he were author of his own life, he would be doing something “real” (as he puts it). He put down his violin and applied to join the Lothian and Borders police, and never looked back. Tim Adams, The Observer

Buy the book

Metamorphosis – How and Why We Change by Polly Morland is published by Profile Books at £8.99 and is available from the Guardian Bookshop at £7.64