Six in the second place is the hexagram's account of influence exercised without initiative. Its subject takes nothing upon herself, attends to the food of the household from the central position, and is firm and correct, and good fortune follows on those terms. The roles it assigns are the roles of the period the text was written in, and a present day reading has to hold two facts at once: the assignment is period-bound, and the mechanism described inside it is not.
That mechanism is worth stating plainly, because it is the transferable part. A person at the centre of an arrangement supplies what everyone in it depends on daily, and dependence of that kind is a standing that never has to be claimed. The line warns against converting it into initiative. Its whole counsel is that the position works because it is not used to push, and that the firmness required is inward, a refusal to be moved off what is correct rather than any effort to move somebody else.
When the line changes, the lower trigram Li becomes Qian and the figure becomes Small Taming, King Wen 9, in which one yielding line restrains five strong ones and the classic is explicit that the restraint is small and is nonetheless effective. The destination names the kind of power this line holds. It is not the power to direct, it is genuine, and the classic is careful in both figures to say exactly how far it reaches and where it stops.