A Stirring Too Slight for Action, and the Turn It Points Toward

Six at the beginning is a reading about noticing rather than about doing. The querent is shown the first faint registration of an attraction, at the furthest extremity of the body, and the text gives no judgement of fortune at all. That silence is the counsel. There is not yet enough present to be right or wrong about, and treating a first stirring as though it were a decision is the error the line quietly guards against.

The commentary adds the one detail that makes the moment worth recording: the subject's mind is already set on what lies beyond him. Something outside has begun to pull. In a hexagram whose entire subject is how one thing moves another, the start of that movement is worth marking even though acting on it would be premature, and the second line will shortly show what becomes of somebody who acts at this stage anyway.

When the line changes, the lower trigram Gen becomes Li and the figure becomes Revolution, King Wen 49, in which an old order is stripped away and the mandate passes to other hands. That is a startling destination for so small a stirring and it is the honest one. Every real change of course in a life begins as something too slight to justify itself, and the classic is willing to say that the toe moving and the mandate turning are one process observed from two distances.