Even the Emperor can get cold feet

Jean Noblet Tarot, Flornoy 2009

Two sayings sum up today's emotions: A man's home is his castle. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

The Emperor is back. He turned up in my recent reading about home buying and he's back again on a day when I've been struck by a case of the predictable but very real home buyer's remorse, also known as 'cold feet'. This happens in the period between the offer being accepted and the exchange of contracts, when you have the time to suddenly think, 'What have I done?' Now, buyer's remorse can happen over any purchase -- I have been known to have it over a pair of shoes, or, yes, a tarot deck, so to think I wouldn't get a big whanging case of it over the biggest purchase of my life would be to think foolishly. What if I paid too much? What if something goes wrong? What if I regret it down the line? And so on and so forth.

Now, what is the image of the Emperor telling me about how to deal with this case of cold feet?

He retains the easy, leaning posture of the Dodal image from my other reading, but this time he's facing to the right side of the card, the future. And he's facing it with the same confidence and assurance. He holds his sceptre out in the direction of the future. His eyes are toward the future. He leans back to ponder a bit, but it certainly doesn't appear that he's given to turning back unless convinced by truly compelling circumstances. Now is the pause before going forward.

How would the Emperor approach the question of whether he should proceed?

The Emperor has one red leg and one blue leg -- he balances things out. Most likely, he would examine the reasons why he began heading in this direction. What factors led him to make the decision? If he has conquered new lands for example, what qualities of the land made it an attractive prospect for conquering? Are those qualities still there? Has anything about the land changed since he decided he wanted to conquer it?

He would probably methodically lay out his concerns and address them one by one. He is, after all, a strategist.  An Emperor would no doubt gather a council to do this, but mere mortals such as ourselves can employ the same technique on our own by laying out two columns in our journal, 'Fear' and 'Reality'. Then we can list all the fears we have about the situation in the first column, and state the facts in the second. For example:

Fear - We might not be able to afford this.
Reality - You can afford it, because you have been pre-approved for a mortgage, advised by a financial adviser, and you have gone through your budget multiple times.

Fear - We might lose our jobs.
Reality - You are no more likely to lose your job as a home owner than you were as a renter. Buying a home does not increase the likelihood of job loss. Also, you can take out insurance to cover costs during any periods of unemployment.

And so on.

Having reviewed his motivations for his initial decision, and worked one by one through his subsequent worries, the Emperor would stay the course, unless very compelling reasons led him to turn back. He can always pick up his shield to defend himself in case the tide truly turns. In fact, if you look closely at the card, the shield appears to be all he's leaning on. There doesn't seem to be a throne there. That either means he can be easily knocked over backward, or he's so committed to forward momentum that he's hardly putting any weight on his backside at all. I'm guessing it's probably the latter.

He most certainly would not allow a case of 'cold feet' -- fears that exist mostly in his imagination -- to hold him back.