Everyone here has probably heard the phrase, “to go against the grain.” The idiom means, to do something contrary to one’s natural inclination, to go in opposition to one’s natural direction, to do something different than the norm. It may mean taking a difficult path, the road less traveled, as Robert Frost said in his famous poem about roads converging in a wood. It might mean going up against the rules or society’s expectations, behaving differently, counter-culturally, ruffling some feathers by doing something unconventional, behaving contrary to one’s own nature.

The word comes from the art of wood planning. When you take a beam of wood and want to plane it, or smooth it, you need to plane it “with” the grain, along with the direction of the wood fibres, so that it becomes smoother a…