The first line of Fellowship with Men shows its subject going out to seek fellowship at the gate of the city rather than remaining inside a private courtyard. Legge's nineteenth century translation keeps the image spare: union sought in the open, at the threshold between one's own household and the wider world, and the verdict attached to it is simply that there is no error. Nothing here promises great achievement. The line only establishes that beginning a fellowship in public, before it narrows into anything exclusive, cannot itself be faulted.
Hexagram 13 places Heaven above Fire, and its whole teaching turns on keeping union broad rather than confined. The gate is the natural image for that teaching at its very first line: a gate opens onto ground shared by everyone, unlike the enclosed clan of the second line that follows it. To seek fellowship there, before any private tie has had the chance to narrow the circle, is to start the hexagram's movement in exactly the direction its Judgment recommends, toward fellowship founded on universal principle rather than kinship or faction.
This is the lowest place of the lower trigram Li, fire's own trigram, and a yang line correctly occupies an odd position here, giving the opening move a soundness that matches its openness. Nothing yet has been tested. The line describes only the choice to go outward rather than inward at the very start, a choice whose value the rest of the hexagram will spend five more lines proving or complicating.