Hexagram 6, Conflict, sets Heaven above Water: heaven rising, water sinking, the two moving apart in opposite directions rather than meeting, an image the Judgment reads as collision and dispute. The first line sits at the very base of the lower trigram, Kan, the trigram of danger and, in this hexagram, of contention itself, and so it marks the earliest and least developed stage any quarrel can be caught in.
The line text is unusually mild for a hexagram built around lawsuits and grievance: not carrying the dispute through to its end draws a little criticism at first, since backing away can look like weakness or an admission of fault, but the outcome is good fortune, because a disagreement abandoned while it is still small costs far less than the same disagreement allowed to run its full course. This is a deliberately practical piece of counsel rather than a moral one. The hexagram as a whole warns against forcing any dispute to its bitter end or using it as an occasion to cross the great water, meaning to attempt some larger, riskier undertaking while contention is still unresolved, and line one shows the cheapest possible way to honor that warning, simply by not letting a small matter become a large one.