Around April 15th, 2017, just a few months after Donald Trump was installed as president, I attended a rally at Daley Center in downtown Chicago. The event was called “Show Us Your Taxes” and featured a giant orange-haired chicken balloon. The blow-up bird was tied to a small stage as if it would lift off and escape the law of gravity if not for the cords.

After nearly four years of scandal and subterfuge, it’s easy to forget the early outcry about Trump’s disregard for the rules, but it has been a constant.

Sharing basic financial information to ensure no conflict of interest seems a reasonable enough requirement for anyone aspiring to an office of such power. Every presidential candidate since Nixon has shared recent tax returns.

The candidate insisted nothing was wrong. Many people who thought they would benefit from his victory helped him get off the hook. Others went along.

When new documents were released last week, demonstrating that the president paid only $750 in personal income taxes in his first years in office (and did not pay anything at all for many of the last twenty years), it was shocking but not at all surprising.

A case of déjà vu (all over again)? Not exactly.

I’ve been thinking about the kerfuffle around Trump’s taxes a lot this past week. I’ve also been thinking about energy work I’ve been doing with a healer and the general state of our country.

People often become entrenched in positions they’ve taken or affiliations they’ve formed regardless of whether those identifications and related behaviors suit their best interest or not. I suppose I still identify with childhood hurts and retreat into defense strategies without thinking.

But people aren’t just the nexus of their affiliations; ethnic identities, voting habits or tax brackets. I’m no longer a child.

No doubt about it, everyone seems to be due for healing work.

It’s hard for me when it feels like I’ve moved past something then encounter a new experience that tells me that I’ve not moved on the way I thought.

I think the country did so much to move past the ugly reach of racism with voting rights legislation, yet voter suppression has been growing during the last few years and unequal use of force by police is endemic.

I have to step back sometimes, when looking at my own life. When it seems I am re-visiting something that I thought would only appear in my rearview mirror, I’ll ask myself if I’m looking at EVERYTHING. Before I conclude that no progress is being made, I’ll ask myself if I am looking at the right things and whether I am being open to ideas that never occurred to me before?

Just when I start thinking, “Oh no, not this again,” I remember that healing is a lifetime process of getting to the truth. Each time something comes up, it’s not that I failed to fix something before. I try to remember that I did what I could at the time.

It’s not necessarily that the issue changes, but each time I come back to look at re-calibrating my relationship with something or with myself, I am different.

This idea is what sustains me in these times. I think the same principles are at play in the world.

It seems like racism and unequal treatment by police (relative to wealth and skin color) have been big problems forever.

Maybe the core issues haven’t changed, but our society is not the same as it was fifty years ago, We are more diverse. We have new technologies. There is a sense that we all have stakes in finding solutions. I have to keep thinking that we can move forward.

I come back to the example of Donald Trump and his taxes. Even dismissing the possibility that he is hiding compromising information about being personally beholding to Putin, the issues of transparency and honesty remain. If he wants to be a leader, of any sort, work is required.

He has been given so many opportunities to move forward, to do better, to live closer to the truth and heal, but I don’t think he’s interested.

This feeling of déjà vu — they’re opportunities. Some of us step up to understand things this way.

Seeing the recurrence of a problem as an opportunity to heal is no small thing.