It comes from the happiness of an integrated life, which includes loss, love, pain, pleasure, error, success, disappointment, and joy. It comes from the ability to stay in touch will your true feelings, needs, and desires within the rhythm and movement of the ever-changing present, to be alternately active or receptive as the tidal conditions of life demand. It is found in the continuous excitement of living experimentally, in accepting life itself as the goal of life. These attitudes are all accessible through the process of keeping a diary. Yet people often associate the content of diaries and the creative process generally primarily with pain and sorrow.
Many diarists admit that they write only when they are confused, unhappy, or full of self-pity.
Some journals even contain a disclaimer stating that the writer is not really as unhappy as the book would indicate, but that the journal gives a slanted self-portrait. This distortion probably comes about from a Western misconception about creativity as the product of pain and frustration. The Eastern concept of creativity is more inclusive. Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. The creative emotion can be joyful as well as painful.