Hexagram 64, Before Completion

Water below, Fire above. Broken, solid, broken, solid, broken, solid, all the way up. Every line is in the wrong place by the old rule, yin where yang belongs and yang where yin belongs. It is the exact reverse of the figure before it.

The figure

Water is the trigram of the middle son, the abyss, depth and danger, a solid line held between two broken ones. Fire is the middle daughter, clinging, light and clarity, a broken line held between two solid ones.

Put fire over water and the picture is a pot sitting beside the stove. The heat rises and the water sits there, and the two never meet. One more move and dinner is on. Get the move wrong and you have a fire and a flood.

The traditional image is a young fox crossing a frozen river. The old fox tests the ice with every step and listens for it. The young fox gets nearly to the far bank, gets excited, and goes through with its tail in the water. The book ends with a wet fox. I have always liked that about it.

Its pair is Hexagram 63, After Completion, Water over Fire, the finished figure that this one is a single step away from. The sequence ends here, at the step before the end, and then starts again at Hexagram 1.

When it comes up in a reading

When Before Completion comes up for a question, you are nearly there. The thing is almost done, the answer almost arrived, the far bank close enough to see the grass on it. The hexagram says so, and then it says the one thing the young fox needed to hear. Careful now.

The sense of the hexagram is that the last stretch is where things get undone. The middle of the river is easy by comparison. The hard part is the last few metres, when you are tired and sure of yourself and the ice is thinnest near the bank. If this is your answer, slow down exactly when everything in you wants to speed up.

And there is hope in it, more than people expect from a figure full of misplaced lines. Every line is wrong, and every line is one move from right. The book chose to end here, with everything still in play, because the moment before completion is where life actually happens. The finished thing is a photograph. This is the room.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you live in the space just before things resolve. Your life has a lot of nearly in it. The time before the relationship settled, before the business turned the corner, before the understanding finally landed. It can be tiring. It is also where the real work gets done, and you are good at it.

You are careful at the threshold. You know that the last ten per cent is the hardest and the most important, and you keep your attention sharp at exactly the point where everyone else relaxes.

You understand that the Book of Changes ends with a beginning. Sixty four figures and the last one says, nearly, go again. You carry that in your temperament.

The gift is finishing properly and then starting fresh, over and over, which is what a life actually asks.

The shadow is exhaustion from living on the threshold. If you come to identify with the nearly and never with the done, you stay on the ice forever, close enough to see the bank and never on it. The second shadow is the young fox, the rush at the end that undoes the care of the crossing. The mature Before Completion crosses, dries its tail, and walks to the next river with the same attention it brought to this one.

The work of a life here is trusting the cycle, completing and beginning again and knowing that the pattern itself is the point.

If a line moves

The I Ching counts lines from the bottom, so line 1 is the lowest. When one of the lower lines is moving, the matter is at its beginning and the counsel is about the fox at the edge of the ice, the wet tail that comes from setting out before you are ready. A moving middle line puts the question at its heart, where the pieces are being moved into their right places and where patience and a firm hand are both needed. A moving upper line speaks to the end of the matter, and here it carries the sense of celebrating before you are across, the cup raised too early that costs you what you nearly had. Whichever line moves, change it to its opposite and you have a second hexagram, the direction the situation is heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page walks through that step by step.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives Water and Fire on their own, with their lines, their places in the family and the pictures they carry. The Chinese Astrology section has a page on Yin and Yang, and reading it beside this figure shows you what yin and yang look like when every one of them is out of position and one step from home. My own association in the tarot is The Fool, the figure at the cliff edge with one foot in the air, because the book ends where the tarot begins, and I hold that as my picture and nothing stronger.

What are you almost finished with, and what would the old fox do differently in the last few metres?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.