What is contentment?  The writer Peter Matthiessen, who passed away recently at the age of 85, devoted much of his life to finding contentment.  Famous for a number of novels and nonfiction books that dealt with a wide range of human and ecological issues, Matthiessen, early in his life, found Buddhism to be his path to peace and contentment. 
     One of Buddhism's virtues, one which I suspect all of us can appreciate, is that we are unhappy because we crave or long for things that are impermanent.  Because we lust after the material artifacts of this world, things that, while perhaps grand and wonderful for what they are, eventually cease to provide us any happiness, we spend our days, as the Buddha put it, suffering.  We long for what will never fulfill us.
     The Buddha's observation turns up, of course, in almost every other religion of the world, usually framed against the backdrop of a God who, these religions insist, is the only source of permanent and lasting happiness.  God or not, we can certainly agree that it is the wise person who learns to hold all things in this life loosely, that what we have today could just as easily be gone tomorrow, and that that for which we crave can quickly become that which we abhor. 
     As Matthiessen remarked toward the end of his life, " . . . I've had a pretty good run of it [life], and I don't want to cling too hard.  I have no complaints."  Matthiessen realized that in the end it was more important to look at what he had experienced rather than  what he had not, and that in our final hours we are better served to accept the end rather than struggle or moan about the inevitability of our destiny.
     On the other hand, we can perhaps learn a different lesson from another of Matthiessen's remarks, these in his The Tree Where Man Was Born.  " . . . I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was."
     Precisely.  God has spoken; the universe speaks, too.  Always.