CONCEPT OF TIME

In our modern society, we see time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years. It is linear. There is a beginning, middle toward the end. But throughout history, there have been cultures who viewed time differently.

The ancient Mayans believed in three different time periods, and took great significance when they time lines crossed paths. The first was cosmic time, charting the constellations, stars, sun and moon to create highly accurate predictions of future solar events. The second was a biologic time, the gestation period for human reproduction (9 months). The third was the seasonal clock which forecast the planting and harvest seasons in relation to the light and darkness of each sun and lunar cycle.

One of the issues with LOST itself was how the series dealt with basic elements of time.

The passage of time was a recurring theme in the series.  Characters traveled in time coming and leaving the island, and skipped randomly through time over a series of episodes. Time also serves as a general recurring theme, with frequent references to time and appearances of clocks and watches.The show's format was also a non-linear narrative. LOST consistently played with time by presenting events out of their chronological order. Initially, action alternated between current events on the island and pre-crash flashbacks. Later episodes featured extended flashbacks and and flashbacks to on-island events. Later, the series featured flash-forwards and physical physical time travel occurred in Season 5.  Then there was the concept of mental time flashes which Desmond had of future events. Then, the action alternated between on-island events and events from the characters' after life which we called the sideways world. 

Within the series, time was explained as a river stream, following not in a straight line, but meandering about (so there is a possibility of circling back in a specific time line). Time was also explained as a loop; that certain events would come back around again (such as the survivors re-living events in their past in the island present.) But what most viewers believe is that we live in a linear time existence: we are born, we live X number of years, then we die. LOST never explained how this common concept of time was true or false in the LOST universe.

There is a common expression that "you only have one life to live."  It is a speech that each individual must live his or her own life to the fullest, because there are no "do-overs."  But in the LOST story, there appeared to be several instances of characters being able to "do over" their past mistakes, or change their regrettable existence. Now, this is clouded by the intervention of a sideways after life world which may or may not contain the island time as a subset of an alternative reality.

So the concept of time cannot give us a definitive clue of how the LOST universe was constructed or how it operated in relation to the flashback events.