So how did I come to have my "It"?
Rather like a mother produces a child, I suppose. Something touched something within me and bore fruit: a word, an idea, an image, a movement.
A tiny germ cell was formed which quietly grew and grew.
 
It must have obtained nourishment from the Big Seven, the exercises for consciousness, looseness, physical unity, balance, sensitivity, timing
and determination.
All these detailed technical exercises only serve as material for producing It by way of play. By this I mean that it cannot be envisaged and realised as a specific result. It is a little like advertising: it is necessary to invest time and effort in a wide range of things, and when success comes it is not possible to put one’s finger on the direct cause.
 
In my case It was suddenly there. For several weeks beforehand I had experimented with ideas to make the Big Seven achievable for all my students,  always in the search for more effective and specific alternatives to the traditional exercises, almost feverishly meditating on Taoist ideas and contrasting them with our occidental, i.e. Greek ideas to gain a better understanding. At night I would sometimes briefly wake up as much as 20 times to write down my ideas, then go back to sleep.
 
And one morning, during a seminar, "It" was there and never left me. Instead "It" became clearer and stronger by the day, so that I often thought "It" would cause my overfilled heart to burst.
While I had previously needed strength to win, the heaviness of my descending hand is now enough.
While I previously needed to resort to speed and guile to show and feel superiority over my younger master students, I can now afford to take all the time in the world and can flow into any opening gap like water. 
While it was previously a "progressively shrinking" advantage in knowledge and sheer routine that helped me to maintain my position, I am now beyond any comparison: I perceive everything in slow motion, and everywhere I find opportunities to slip through effortlessly.
 
How long did it take before I finally obtained "It"? How long was this laborious process of clumsily hacking out artificial techniques, of tirelessly regurgitating movements which only very gradually began to feel more natural? The initially only intellectual acquisition and absorption of Taoist ideas and WingTsun principles? 
Many, many years, decades ...
And somehow I am glad it did not happen more quickly, as my ego would not have coped with this onset of superiority, which arrived like an unexpected lottery win.
For decades, and despite "the best possible, personal instruction", my progress was limited to the technical aspects, and hardly amounted to more than possessing greater knowledge than others.
 
And then - as a result of a long, latent maturation process – a giant leap forward which I would no longer have dared to hope for!
Since then I have known that one can religiously practice the solo and partner forms, stand on one leg and consciously breathe in a "reverse way", or recite the movement sequences of one’s elders.. or spend hours on end striking the dummy’s arms, or finding harmony in Chi-Sao until a trance-like state occurs.
All in vain. 
At least if it is with a view to achieving very quick results. And to avoid any misunderstanding: I do not merely mean the ability to defend oneself, as that tends to come about very soon! No, I am talking about "effortless" effectiveness, an efficiency which comes to us of its own accord and lets victory fall into our hands like an over-ripe fruit.
 
Of course all these efforts are not really "in vain", as they help to develop the Big Seven. As an inevitable process, but only if we give them the time to mature.
Menzius warns us with this little story: a farmer in Sung comes home from his fields weary but content, and proudly tells his children how hard he has worked: "I have managed to raise all my seedlings out in the field!" When his children go out to see the results of their father’s "green fingers", they find the seedlings are almost completely dried out.  
 
Let us be careful not to see this quite natural development process in WT as something mystical. It is not, any more than Satori or so-called enlightenment are mystical. For Buddhists an individual is already enlightened if he offers no resistance to the flow of life, but goes with it.
Anybody who attaches such high-flown labels as mystical to the inevitable results of diligent homework is placing them on such a high pedestal that in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophesy, he will never achieve them!
 
So now you know what "It" is?
"It" (zhi) is a Chinese non-word that replaces an object without being it, and usually refers to that most Chinese of all terms, the Tao – the way. In fact we Europeans also say "It", though perhaps on another level: it works, it fits … when a movement has become second nature to us, so that we can always fall back on it like a natural reservoir.