We spent our lives seeking opportunities to nourish our bodies and minds or defending it from threats. We seek food and pleasure and friendship and power and security. We also create things—goods and services and ideas and art. In other words, life is either about inputs or outputs, getting things or giving things, consuming, or generating, thinking about the self or the other, withdrawing in meditation, or engaging with the world outside. When does it all stop? Death? Why do we have this urge to be productive? What stops us from doing nothing?

Vishranti, or relaxation, is very different from having fun, from enjoying life, from pursuit of pleasure (kama) and consumption (bhoga). In Puranas, we equate Indra’s Swarga with the good life, the pursuit of pleasure, the state of having fun. But we equate Vishnu’s Vaikuntha with vishranti—lying on the coils of a serpent that floats on the ocean of milk, or on a fig leaf cradled by waves of an ocean, or on a swing, with Lakshmi, goddess of fortune, by our side, chewing pan, confident in the knowledge that the restless goddess is not going to run away, but is eager to be with us.