Underwear

I'm not sure where this one is going but it feels important.

Lately, I've gotten into the practice of being totally engaged in the task in front of me from the time I wake up in the morning until I walk in to the door of the zendo (which is all of about ten minutes). It goes like this:
Light turns on, I wake up and get out of bed. I take off my pajamas and put on my clothes. I put on my helmet, grab my bike and keys, open the door, get on my bike, and ride to the zendo.
Of course, throughout this entire routine about a million thoughts jump into my head. When they do, I say to myself: "Those are your thoughts, get back to your existence" and focus my gaze and mind on the task in front of me: putting on socks, grabbing a sweatshirt, watching the street in front of me as the wheel of my bike passes over it.
On Friday morning, this happened:
The light turned on, I got out of bed. I pulled off my pajama pants and pulled on my fleece pants. As I pulled them on...
"underwear" occurred to me.
"Oh," I thought. "I need underwear." So I took off my fleece pants, got a pair of underwear from my drawer, put them on, and then put back on my fleece pants and went on with the rest of my routine.
But then as I was riding to the zendo it struck me: this is kind of how it works. If you are present to the moment in front of you, the "underwear" occurs.  You don't grasp at it, you don't freak out when it happens, it just shows up and when it does, you exist with it while it's there and then you move on.
See, I could have had a bunch of other interactions with the underwear:
Dude, you forgot your underwear?
Okay, from now on, you're going to put your underwear out with the rest of your clothes so you don't forget.
You're so lame that you can't even remember your underwear.
Remember when you forgot to wear underwear to church that one time when you were litle?
And on and on and on...
But the thing is, none of that happened this time.
See, it's weird- I struggle a lot with, like, what does it mean to be present? What does it mean to not grasp at things? How do you engage without getting caught up? What's it like to exist this way? How does it all work?
But that morning, when my underwear occurred to me, it was like a little mini lesson in a little parallel universe. It was like, okay, you live your life and you're present to it. And things come up and they just occur to you and you just respond  to them just as they are: underwear. Not "lame for forgetting" or "make sure it doesn't happen again" just underwear, and put it on.
I don't know, maybe it isn't important, but for me, it feels like maybe, someday, in this universe I'll be able to have things like child yelling out "You don't care about me! That's why you won't call on me!" just occur and maybe I'll be able to just respond instead of hearing "you don't give her enough attention" or "turn her card to yellow so she doesn't call out again."
Right now, I have no idea what just responding to her would actually be. But I feel like if I start being present to my classrom and my kids, the way I'm present for the first ten minutes of my day, maybe they can start to just occur to me too and that feels like I'll be on the way to responding to them instead of feeling hurt by them (and hurting them in return) or trying to change them to avoid any future suffering.