Divinity Atlas

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Almost, and the Discipline of Not Rushing

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Almost, and the Discipline of Not Rushing

Hexagram 64 describes a situation that is nearly resolved and is not resolved yet, and its counsel is consistently about the danger of the last stretch.

The fox image carries it. In the judgement the little fox has almost completed the crossing when it gets its tail wet, and nothing furthers. The first line repeats it: the tail in the water, humiliating. What is being described is failure at the point where success seemed assured, caused by relaxing before the end.

The middle lines are more encouraging. The second brakes the wheels, and perseverance brings good fortune. The fourth has perseverance bringing good fortune and remorse disappearing, with a three-year campaign against a demon country and rewards from a great realm, one of the book's several references to a long military expedition, and a sign of the material the compilers were working from. The fifth is unambiguously good: the light of the superior person is true, and there is good fortune with no remorse.

The sixth line closes both the hexagram and the sequence with a scene: drinking wine in genuine confidence is blameless, but wetting the head is another matter, and one loses what is right. The book's last image is somebody at a celebration who has had too much of it.

Read against hexagram 63, the pair states the book's basic position on process, and reading either without the other misses the argument they were placed together to make. Completion is provisional; incompletion is workable; and the book declines to end on either note by ending on both.

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