"How do you see yourself in ten years?"

A fair question. A valid query. And usually answered with some coherency and certainty by large majorities of your standard work-a-day population.

Ask an expatriate the same question or even a slightly distilled version such as: "Do you think you might possibly be here, or in the general vicinity of say 1,000 square miles, next year - or…tomorrow?", and any chance of a solid yea or nay vanishes.

Life is a series of adjustments to upheavals, and we all know about the best laid plans, but generally most people have a pretty fair idea of their long term - or at least what country they might live it out in.

Even career expatriates such as diplomats who have the security of a job are, geographically speaking, a mess. In the time it takes most of us to get really settled into a new house, make friends, and put the garden in, they're careening off into other time zones, with new languages and cultures to master.

An expatriate mother was very quick to pick up on the fact that her 13 year old American son, who has "…spent his life…moving every two to three years", is "…totally comfortable with adopting the country he lives in as 'his' rather than 'theirs'." She was happy to remind other global nomads of the resiliency of children, their inate ability to make a house - any house - their home.

Those who live abroad on their own, without any affiliation to home government or business, are even more difficult to pin down. A vast majority of these expats work teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL), a highly transferable job in demand in most countries, making it easy to waltz from one place to another, picking up jobs along the way.

One Canadian teacher who's been living in Korea the past eight years casually remarked that he might like to try Poland, for reasons of it being possibly culturally interesting to him. Sort of the way those a jot more set in their ways might take a crack at a new Thai dish or, for the truly bold, a novel shade of hair color.

Sometimes the nomadic life is chosen, sometimes just fallen into, sometimes the result of earlier life choices. How it ends is anybody's guess.