Influence begins at the point of the body furthest from the heart. Legge's translation shows the subject moving his great toes, and the commentary on the image says his mind is set on what is beyond himself. Nothing has yet happened that anybody could act on. A toe moves, and the whole content of the line is that a movement has registered at an extremity while the person it belongs to has not gone anywhere at all.
The figure is built as an ascending series through the body and this is its first station. Lake rests above mountain, the trigram of joy above the trigram of stillness, and the classic reads the pair as mutual attraction, something open resting on something firm. Its judgement speaks of a young lady taken in marriage, which frames the whole hexagram in the courtship terms of the society the text comes from. That framing belongs to the period. The process the lines actually trace, an influence rising from an extremity through a body until it reaches speech, does not depend on it.
The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the ordinary rule, at the floor of the lower trigram Gen. Gen is the mountain and its character is stopping, so a soft line at its base has very little movement available and no strength with which to force any. The text neither praises nor blames it, which is unusual, and the omission is the reading: a stirring at the toe is not yet a thing an outcome can be attached to.