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For a man variously described as reflective, deliberate and contemplative, there are certain things that Vic Snyder simply doesn’t think about. An example: How has your life differed from what you imagined as a young man?

“I don’t think about that junk.”

Another example: Any regrets?

“I don’t think about that a lot.”

What he does think about is time or, rather, the lack of it. Snyder uses the phrase “battling against time” more than once during an interview on a gray morning three days after Christmas. And if he does have regrets they involve not having enough time, enough time to learn everything the endlessly curious Snyder would like to learn. That’s the takeaway from this conversation: Vic Snyder wants to learn, wants to know, wants to experience. Although some replies from the soon-to-be-former congressman from Arkansas could come off as curt, they don’t. Snyder, soft-spoken and self-contained, is also gentle, courteous and self-deprecating. He has, after all, made time to talk to a reporter just a few days before he’ll officially leave a job that was for him, in most ways, the “perfect job.”

But life happened to Snyder. Now he’s learning how to raise four sons under the age of 5. He’s learning how to do this at the age of 63, when most people are preparing for retirement, tackling their “bucket lists” and dreaming of a slower pace.

Our visit takes place in Snyder’s Little Rock office in the Prospect Building, an office in the process of being dismantled, hectic with the flurry of employees packing up the paraphernalia of a 14-year congressional career.

Snyder, a Democrat elected to the 2nd District seat in 1996, announced in January of last year that he wouldn’t seek re-election. He cited “the persuasive and powerful attraction of our three one-year old boys under the leadership of their three-year old brother.” Those would be Penn, now 4, born in May 2006, and his three brothers, triplets Wyatt, Sullivan and Aubrey, born in December 2008.

Betsy Singleton Snyder, whom Snyder married in 2003, gave up her job as a pastor at Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church soon after the triplets were born to devote herself full time to her family.

Snyder is acutely aware that the end of his seven terms in Congress is approaching. Asked when he leaves office, he says: “I believe it is 11:59 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 3. I think we actually get a half-day pay.”

He says he doesn’t know what he’s going to do to earn a living, and earn a living he must. In late January comes the announcement that he’s joining Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield as corporate medical director for external affairs. But that’s a month away and now he’s being asked to look back over his life and career.

The best and the worst things about being a congressman are flip sides of the same coin.

The best:

It’s “a tremendous opportunity to learn new things,” Snyder says. “There’s really no topic that I could not pick up the phone and tell my staff, ‘I want to have a briefing on such and such.’ And somewhere at the end of the line will be somebody who says, ‘My God, a congressman wants me to come and educate them about nanotechnology.’”

The worst:

“You’re always battling time. I’m a pretty high-energy guy, and particularly when I was single, I didn’t mind that. But as time has gone by and [with] increasing family responsibilities, it became a battle that was kind of agonizing.”

Snyder says being a congressman is “essentially three jobs.”

The first is constituency service, staying in touch with and helping the people of the district. That was a job that even many of his critics think Snyder performed well. Job two is the Washington work “of getting up to speed on the policy of issues facing the country.” And the third job is running for re-election. For many in Congress, it’s a year-round activity. Snyder took a different approach, waiting until January of the election year to crank up the re-election machine.

“Members of Congress are never bored,” he says.

Most importantly, Snyder says, serving his state and country was a privilege.

“You’re always aware of what a tremendous honor it is to participate at that level of our elective democracy. I have other friends who are leaving now, some very gifted members. And you’re almost sentimental about it when you’re leaving because you realize what a special thing it is. And it’s not related to you as a person. It’s related to the office, that you’re part of this legacy of our democracy.”

“Almost sentimental” appears to be as soft an emotion as Snyder will allow himself to publicly declare, much less demonstrate. That doesn’t mean, however, that he himself isn’t a bit in awe of the history he has witnessed from a front-row seat.

“Maybe it always is this way,” he says. “But it seems like the last 14 years has had a lot going on.”

Snyder lists some of the great and not-so-great events: The presidential re-election of Bill Clinton the same year Snyder was elected to Congress; the impeachment of that same president; the contested 2000 presidential election; the Bosnian conflict; 9/11; the invasion of Afghanistan; the decision to go to war in Iraq, a decision Snyder opposed; the election of this nation’s first African-American president.

A lot going on indeed.

Snyder says he formulated no life plan when he was young, unlike Bill Clinton, who, as a boy in 1963, shook hands with John F. Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden and knew he wanted to enter public service. Snyder wanted to do a variety of things and has, such as, for example, operate a gas station, something he did in the summer of 1970 in Colorado when he was 22.

“So I can say, ‘OK, I managed and leased my own gas station,’ but I wasn’t a job hopper because they opened it on June 1 and closed it the day after Labor Day,” Snyder says, and it seems very important to him that one realize he wasn’t a job hopper, because that wouldn’t be responsible and Snyder is responsible.

“That’s not exactly a life plan, but I was interested in doing a variety of things, and I think I still am. That Rooster Cogburn thing fell through,” a reference to his joke that he would have liked to have been cast as the weathered U.S. marshal in the remake of “True Grit.”

The gas station stint came after Snyder, a native of Oregon, enlisted in the Marines at the age of 19 and did a tour of duty in Vietnam. It came before he enrolled in medical school, winding up in Arkansas to do his residency at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. At some point in between Snyder worked as an orderly in a nursing home and in a hospital and as an emergency medical technician in an emergency room.

So if Snyder was responsible even as a young man — not a job hopper — still, his young manhood signals a certain restlessness, a yearning for experience.

Snyder, who practiced family medicine in Little Rock for about 15 years, earned a law degree in his spare time. He also managed to serve in refugee camps in Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Cambodia and Honduras and in the Arkansas Legislature as a state senator.

Now, fatherhood consumes Snyder. Snyder’s parents divorced when he was just a toddler and his own father wasn’t much of a presence in his life.

Asked how fatherhood has changed him, he says, “I don’t know yet. I’m still new at it. We went from not knowing how to swim and right off the bat decided to swim the English Channel in a big Northern storm.”

The holidays were chaos and “it’s particularly chaotic when you have as many little guys as we do running around. And at times you get overwhelmed by it. It’s what’s always on your mind.”

Fatherhood may at times be overwhelming but it’s also another grand, perhaps the grandest, experience.

“Being a parent is a very special thing that I thought had passed me by,” Snyder says. “I didn’t get married at all until I was 55. Then we had our first child when I was 58, so it just seemed like an incredible life bonus for me to become a father at age 58 and then three times again two years later.”

Vic Snyder has lived the life of at least three people, but at 63, a husband and father to four young sons, he hasn’t even scratched the surface of what there is to know. He’s philosophical about it.

Snyder describes talking to Bill Paschall, the political consultant, a day or so after he announced that he wasn’t seeking re-election.

“I said, ‘Well, Bill, when we started this — because I started with him in 1990 running for the state Senate, then in 1996 running for Congress — when I was a 49-year-old bachelor,’ I said, ‘Did you ever think that my political career would end because I had four babies including a set of 2-year-old triplets?’ He started laughing and said, ‘No, that’s really not what I thought.’

“So I think that’s just the nature of life. Things change.”